Here, you’ll need this.
It’s literally the opposite my dudes. Mercy players have been referred as cultists and have been witch hunted on the forums and the real life proof is undertone. He made a thread to solely find other witch hunters (and with cringe united them under the name “st. knights of undertone”) and started insulting every Mercy player that came to his thread. He said (in his symm thread) that JAMES was derailing the thread (by posting 2 replies about mercy LMFAO, k).
His threads ended up being 404’ed. Reasonably.
Musica, I don’t know if you have seen previous posts of Undertone, but the guy putting up a show is him. Not us lmfao.
Also I don’t care undertone. You called us cultists, then said its a joke. Now you are going around saying “I know ur address now” then again ‘issa djouk’. Nobody finds its funny. Stop
You are comedy gold my friend, absolute comedy gold. Thank you for making me laugh. I’ve saved your comment by the way in case you decide to delete the evidence.
So you and your buddies harassed me in my thread, then falsely accused me for real life threat? What’s next? 
Your mob justice attempts at character assassination are so funny at this point. Are you going to photoshop something I “said” next and attempt to fabricate some other “evidence”?
I don’t know him, nor he is my friend.
I can judge only what i see and, in this topic, it seems to me that it isn’t up to what you said. Maybe he was, here’s not showing and it seems that he’s mostly arguing about his ideas.
I also never addressed him, i addressed your action which was, exactly as i said, jumping the gun without having read the posts and the contest.
Basically, you were wrong and it doesn’t make you look good to, instead of backin off and sayin “Yeah, welp, i screwed up lol” which could have been awesome and brought to you all my respect(Not that you need it, but i guess it’s always nice to have people respecting you for your action and ideas), you went for the road of:
With emphasys on the bolded part, where you keep on showing that you didn’t understand the context, like he said that to scare someone and then said that it was a joke to cover it up, when it was just a reply to a witty comment which was in line with the comment made.
Imma go GreyFalcon mode. You are not worthy my response. You are a joke. (dw, its a joke)
This conversation leads to nowhere as you are not standing behind your words. Therefore I’m gonna quit it, have fun.
People harass me in my threads all the time, stop acting like the thread is your home.
Also I don’t know who the “buddies” are lmfao.
That’s not necessarily an issue caused by spam, but the fact that you have a massive, and I mean massive, user base all posting on the same page.
If we had sub-forums like hero-specific discussions, you could avoid seeing so many topics posted repeatedly.
And as I’ve said before, people love to use stereotypes because it generates attention. A lot of the Mercy threads I’ve read are just trolls intentionally baiting people by saying stuff like, “Mercy’s not a main healer anymore.”
And as I’ve explained to you, in order to prove your case you need evidence. That’s the difference between an actual group and a perceived group (a stereotype).
If we’re talking about actual solutions (which is a welcome debate, by the way) I’d just go with the suggestion I’ve voiced above and as I’ve heard so many times before: Blizzard should just put in the effort, and create hero-specific sub-forums.
It’s obvious that an imbalance of hero discussions bothers people (regardless of whether we agree on the circumstances), and simply dividing the forum into more categories will solve that issue on its own.
But if I’m going to be honest here, I don’t think there are a whole lot of developer activity on the forums. I think if there was, these issues would have been solved ages ago. And we’d have rotating game modes in Arcade during the summer event already.
Alright. I honestly can’t tell on these forums. I often get attacked left and right.
Depends on what you imagine the outcome of this discussion is going to be. If I agree with you, what will the solution be? We actively flag posters we believe are spamming? You can do that already. Don’t need multiple flags for the report to count, it only hides the post if it gets mass flagged. I’ve flagged inappropriate posts and seen them disappear within minutes.
Where as my message is that if you want better discussions, you should create them. Complaining about people complaining isn’t going to create the forum you want. Just as you took the incentive to create a more interesting debate right here in this thread.
That address thing was pretty blatantly a joke based on that rent free thing. Even i could tell. Just saying.
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You yourself said it went down because of flags, it isn’t bias, it’s what happens. Good for the LGBT community to have a megathread, we also had our’s, but guess what? People false flagged, regardless of the thread, so if anyone lacks maturity, it’s the people who whine and moan about threads they don’t have to even click on.
If y’all remake/bump a new thread it’ll probably be cleared of flags by mods. I think part of the issue was that threads that were flagged were being merged there and it might have been taking on those flags.
I don’t believe in neither flaggin nor reporting, unless is an extreme case.
I just want to understand your point mostly. As i said, i came in just because your first post was right about the social mechanisms and such, but i’m still convinced that in this instance it isn’t what’s going on, but mostly what you believe it’s going on and you seem to be refusing the fact that we, the people you think are making the stereotype, are telling you that is not. But i’ll get into the details later.
What i also expect from this it’s either you to change my mind by showing me reasoning that i can’t refute, and believe me i’m not someone who’s not open to having his mind changed nor it’s too stubborn to stay in his position when he’s clearly wrong or solid, logic reasoning has proven my point faulty; or having you realize that while the thought underling this whole argument it’s a good one, it’s not applicable here because this is not happening(The stereotyping)or atleast it’s not happening in my mind nor in the mind of people who are not just trolling.
The issue is not caused by spam. It’s caused by people who spam.
The reason because this reply is takin so long to be posted is because i’ve litterally just been shifting throu a thousand posts about Mercy with a search tool that seems to be broken since it’s not allowing me anymore to search only in titles.
But anyway, if you would do that yourself, you will see that there are people systematically making threads about Mercy that are, DECLARED BY THEMSELVES, Mercy Mains. And i’m obviously excluding the people who are clearly trolling because they, ofc, don’t fall into the “Mercy Mains” we are talking about, they fall in the “Troll” category.
And, i did not say this openly because i really think it’s clear but i will say it once and for all:
I’m not against anyone’s right to make a thread or speak his mind in any way.
What am i against, but not to the point to make a thread about it or flag the user even tho i will pop up in their discussions and quickly disrupt, is seeing the same group of people who are FREQUENT POSTERS and users of the forum make threads about one subject, be it any subject you want, continuously even tho there are already thread, about his issue, on the front page.
At some point, it just becomes common sense.
Four threads about my subject? Awesome, i will post in one of them.
Thinkin that making a 5th it’s okay with everyone is just dumb. And also, scatters the opinions of the people you want to talk about this and that care about this even more.
And this is why i don’t think the stereotype thing really works.
We are aware that it’s not all of them. But is, once again, the majority of “Players who identify themselves as Mercy Mains on the forum”. We are not talkin about people who play Mercy and are not spamming, we are not talking about the trolls who contribute to this(and we have to say something here and make a distinction: First, trolling is okay on some degree, just as spam is. But enough is enough. Don’t make threads, join them. Or go to 4chan, or just troll reddit. Even tho trolling Tumbrl is the funniest. The other thing is if a troll is trolling Mercy threads by makin Mercy threads, of any kind, he is not considered in this pool, he has his own pool. If the guy makin a thread about Mercy, to troll, who happens to be also a Mercy mains, he falls into the category of Mercy mains).
The categories are just to identify. The category doesn’t make the user, the user belongs to said category if he meets the criteria. The criteria of the “Mercy Mains” group is being a “Mercy Main”, often identifying himself as that.
The people who spam aren’t all the people in the “Mercy Mains” group, are the Majority of that group. This, doesn’t make any kind of stereotype if you have this idea in mind. All =/= Majority.
The thing you can argue here is that the sayin “Majority” is a stretch because we don’t have a definite number. And i agree on that, but to some extent.
People not identified as Mercy Main aren’t in the group anyway. If they identify as Mercy mains, but reality is we don’t know, and don’t get to know, they shouldn’t feel included in the “Spammer Mercy Mains” category(I will use this to differentiate from now on, because sayin majority of Mercy mains are spammers it’s too long and confusing, even the phrasing could be) if they don’t spam and if they do, they are included, but we can’t really know unless they actively start spamming or proclamating themselves as such.
As you can see, this is selective. No one is thrown into that group without a reason. This is not something based on icon, this is based on what they say and on what they do.
And also, this shows you that Majority is not a term that means “a lot”, it means “more then half of x people into y group”. If the group is made of 5 people, and the forum is populated by 100 users, but out of those 5 people 4 of them are spammers, saying “the majority of users in that group are spammers” it’s not meant to mean that there are a lot of spammers. They could very well be, in and out of the group, but we are talking about a determined group here which both in the example and on this forum is pretty small anyway because as you can see, it’s a group in which you enter by yourself and no one can put you there unless you come out as such. And even in the group, there are differences between users in that group. You are in that group and spam? You are one of the “Mercy main spammers”. You are in the group but don’t spam? You are just a “Mercy main”.
Atm, the group as proved himself to contain various spammers to the point they are the majority, but not all.
This is why it’s not a stereotype. It’s based on the actions of the user. You get judged and called upon your action, not by the group. The group just stays there to identify. Could be a tracer main, a rein main, ana main. That does not matter.
No one, especially not me, is out to get someone.
This is biased and wrong anyway. The “false flaggin” was done on the little threads that were littering the board. While i don’t condone flaggin, i still understand the party who flagged those threads that were out of the megathread and were out of control.
The LGTB megathread comparison was meant to show you that it’s their fault(The flaggin party) as much is it yours for spamming.
If this wasn’t true and people were on a crusade against Mercy threads, just like people were sayin they were on a crusade against the LGTB community threads, the LGTB megathread would be down too.
The problem is spam, once again.
It does matter because the spam was real. In that period, when all of this went down, and it was between the beginning and the 14th of july, if i recall correctly, we were having something like 10 to 13 threads about mercy active each day.
You really are convinced that’s not spam?
Yes, I felt the same way about the hanzo Nerf spam, the doomfist Nerf spam, the summer games spam and the price of the all Star skins spam.
Check my playtime and It’ll validate what I’m about to say. Genji mains for the most part are toxic 12 year olds. I main him and people still get toxic AF over me picking him. I’ve learned that goes for most heroes though, say I pick rein with a rein main on my team they get toxic/ tell me to give them their hero. I usually do because who am I to take their main.
I’m happy to hear that.
In a forum post in May, Jeff indicated that the team felt that Mercy was fine. From mid May to mid July the forums were inundated with nerf Mercy threads. A huge portion of these threads asked for her healing to be nerfed to 50 hps. This was not the first time that such a campaign preceded a design change.
Regardless of our varying opinions about the definition of spam, do you agree that there is good reason to believe that being vocal on these forums can convince the development team and lead to changes in the actual game?
And if so, isn’t that a legitimate use for the forums that many people might legitimately feel trumps your desire for the conversation to be organized and curated?
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I believe personally that the dev team isn’t influenced much by the forums. There have been rein bug fix posts for about 6 months now and they still aren’t fixed.
I also believe the dev team is selective in what they read if the forums do influence them. If they see a mercy “fix” thread they’ll read it and consider it. If they see 10 mercy “fix” threads it won’t influence them anymore than the single one will.
side note I don’t hate mercy players in fact I like you as a whole for the most part. I find mercy dreadfully boring to play, always have and always will. So it’s not a bias against the content of the threads I’m just annoyed that 85% what I see is just mercy threads.
I definitely didn’t get the impression that you hate Mercy players all. I think it was crystal cleat that you were complaining about the volume of Mercy threads and not about Mercy players as a whole.
I personally think that there’s really good reason to believe that the team can be influenced by the forums. I’ve seen it happen so many times - a topic becomes very popular on the forums and shortly thereafter a change is effected in the game. It’s not just Mercy. There are numerous examples (Bastion’s ironclad reversion, Sombra’s buff reversions, Genji’s big nerfs a while back, Tracer’s nerf, etc.) I wish they were as attentive to Rein’s bugs as they were to those other topics, Rein really needs some love.
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I have very little faith in the dev team nowadays. But I still do believe that doing it in mass quantities won’t help anything more than a couple of quality threads.
They’re toxic because they have out-of-combat self regen. 
I definitely share your lack of faith in the development team. That seems to be the one point that you can get good portions of the community to agree on.
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Mercy mains on the forums be false reporting people too.
I don’t think you’re making the stereotype. But there are some pretty blunt examples. There was a thread recently (I think it’s been deleted because I can’t find my response to it in my history anymore) that was literally blaming Mercy mains for his forum suspension (“I only called them wimps”) and the replies to said thread were just so over-the-top I actually gave up trying to respond.
But even this topic has plenty of posts that feeds the stereotype:
In no way am I asking you to defend other people’s posting. But the way that these threads “flood the main page” is that the main page is actually constantly flooded. Threads usually live about 3-10 minutes before they’re buried by new topics.
So you have to continuously reply to get a thread to stay afloat and obviously being as provocative as the original post and some of the replies to this thread will keep posters engaged.
Your posting isn’t anything like that in comparison. You’re very elaborate, meaning posters have to take a long time to formulate an argument to properly debate with you and from my experience, most posters on this forum don’t spend that long on their replies and usually only read the first 10-20 replies at best (you can witness this behavior on how quickly the number of likes on mega threads decline as you scroll down).
I don’t expect to change your mind at all. But this has more to do with the fact that it’s really hard to change someone’s mind. (Time stamped, but it’s worth watching the entire video if you enjoy this topic.)
I think I’ve managed to change someone’s mind on this forum once in a debate. It’s really not a goal worth setting. But you have changed my mind in the sense that I really thought there wasn’t going to be any worthwhile discussion to have in this thread, but you proved otherwise in a very positive way.
I appreciate that you actually put effort into gathering evidence, and I think we should just agree to disagree on this matter. Because I don’t think you’ll like my response to what you said:
It’s still confirmation bias when you’re going by select examples and looking for things you want to see. Even if you get a large number of results, you still don’t know how large a percentage that is of the totality.
It’s an unfair argument because I already knew it’s not possible to actually provide any evidence due to the sheer fact that there’s just no way to realistically create this data—unless you want to sit and idly note every thread and response (which is still, to some degree, largely subjective depending on what you even classify as a “Mercy main” response).
I actually criticized that as well recently and I do believe there are some posters that are actively spamming Mercy threads and just being really unconstructive.
But.
I don’t believe these posters are more notorious than other posters of the same type. Which is to say there are plenty of other posters as equally bad. We just notice them more because of our confirmation bias. For example, I’m really tired of the irrational Mercy threads too which is what made me click in on this topic instead of the other 20 irrational topics.
But you’re the one that defines the group. This was the same issue with Undertone’s point because he was associating people with the “Discord group” even though they had no relevance to it. So your definition of the group might not be accurate, which deflates the point of trying to define them as such.
To give you some contradiction, let’s say that we have 100 spammers on the forum currently. That’s probably not too far-fetched. How many of those are spamming about Mercy specifically? Spammers are an issue that should be dealt with, but why is it necessary to limit it to “Mercy” to address your point? Is it too far-fetched to guess it’s you’ve become more annoyed with the Mercy threads and therefore more likely to notice their spam?